Where was "1,2,3,4?" Feist's concert at Toronto's Massey Hall may have challenged some fans, but to the rest, there's no limit to their love of all things Leslie Feist.

Just under a fifth of the way through her nearly two hour performance, Leslie Feist sheepishly turned to the sold out Massey Hall audience and posed a question:

“Do you still love me?”

Out of the lips of any other former chart-topping, iPod shilling, feel-good success the question would be rhetorical. Yet, In the context of her current artistic foray, the otherwise throwaway line took on a deeper meaning.

On her latest album, Metals, the Calgary-bred, (sometimes) Toronto-based singer chose to reject the trappings of pop success in favour of an exploration into tribal rhythms and traditional Americana arrangements. It’s a bold artistic step for an artist who was swept into the traditional pop world, but not exactly a surprising one.

Like the fruitful, intermingling anarchy of struggling artists who birthed her (along with cohorts Metric and Broken Social Scene), Feist gained celebrity in spite of her ambitions. Her bedroom anthems spoke to a deeper personal truth. They were primal in emotion, yet undeniably catchy and, perhaps most importantly, intrinsically honest, delivered by one of the most pure voices in music history.

With the weight of success off her shoulders, and thanks to a self-imposed hiatus, Metals is the natural evolution to those touchstones. Its songs are born of isolation. No longer introspective, their sparse instrumentation and group vocals speak to an artist with too much time to be self-reflective. No longer under the imposed stress of friends, family and the overly fraternal public, the album’s songs weave an intricate tale of a woman trying to understand communication through isolation, questing how to better lead by exploring the core of music as storytelling.

Which is why they fail so miserably in a live setting.

As was evidenced Thursday night, Feist’s forte is the ability to be real. It’s what makes her sometimes amateurish inter-song banter feel folksy. When she was on (mostly when she used her “time machine” to travel back to her earlier albums, and specifically during a pounding rendition of "My Moon, My Man" that inspired a stage invasion which eventually grew to an occupation of 50 or so attendees) she was transcendent in claiming the primal pulse of her fans. But despite the ambition of the new songs, their inability to connect on a visceral level in a live setting created a barrier that her insistence on reinterpreting and flat out denying to play some of her biggest hits (including "1,2,3,4") only exasperated the crowd.

Despite a rather enraptured audience willing the night on to success, and Feist’s undeniable star quality, her live show was ultimately doomed by her own ambition. Unlike the cheerful explosion of her rise to success (so beautifully and jubilantly captured in 2010 documentary Look At What The Light Did Now), Thursday’s performance was marred by Feist’s insistence on digging deeper; on trying to expand and renew; on being, well, Feist.

In essence, the things we love about Leslie Feist as an artist are the things we deplore about her as a performer. It’s a harsh pill to swallow, but perhaps one that, with her sugary personality, goes down easier than nearly any other current band or singer-songwriter.

Lucky for Leslie Feist, there is no limit to our love. She’ll be back and so will we.

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